The London Film Festival opens this week with 360, starring Jude Law and
Rachel Weisz, but the film is a glossily unengaging trudge, writes Robbie
Collin.

The BFI London Film Festival opened in 2005 with Fernando Meirelles’s adaptation of The Constant Gardener; the following year it opened with The Last King of Scotland, co-written by Peter Morgan.

This week, the first in the festival’s 55th year, that honour fell to 360, a picture directed by Meirelles and written by Morgan – and, on this evidence, whatever the two men have learned in the past half-decade or so, they should probably try their best to forget.

This glossily unengaging trudge through other people’s love lives is based on the Arthur Schnitzler play La Ronde, a portrayal of 10 interconnecting affairs that between them breach all the social boundaries of Viennese society.

But La Ronde’s central conceit – that sex is no respecter of class – does not survive the reimagining: save a call girl and a tattooed rapist, 360’s characters are the kind of Rioja-swilling, open-necked-shirt types that wouldn’t be out of place in a Richard Curtis romcom. With that potentially interesting dynamic removed, what’s left is a sequence of downbeat sex skits, slotted together with all the finesse of an Ikea cabinet.

The film begins in Vienna, where a prostitute (Lucia Siposová) is sent to a hotel bar to meet a married man on a business trip (Jude Law). He feels guilty and phones his journalist wife (Rachel Weisz) in London. She in turn is having an affair with a swarthy colleague (Juliano Cazarré), whose heartbroken girlfriend (Maria Flor) ups and leaves… and on things trundle, all the way round the world and back to the prostitute again.

Nobody’s on screen for long, so the cast have scant opportunity to showboat and character development is, at best, limited. Meirelles tries to loosen things up with visual gimmicks, but often these result in the film feeling daft as well as flat. One scene shows a dentist (Jamel Debbouze) gazing at an aeroplane with the object of his affections on board. The shot dissolves to an indoor close-up of the dentist’s face; but the plane, now toy-sized, remains on screen and flies through the room, serenely gliding behind his head. Because she’s going through his mind, you see? As you might imagine, this all looks spectacularly stupid.

The only person who comes out of 360 well is Anthony Hopkins, who plays a father trying to track his missing daughter. Not only does he swerve the film’s cringiest machinations, he also gets its only good monologue – and makes an enjoyable meal of it.

Meirelles and Morgan are better than this, to say nothing of the London Film Festival. I suspect everyone concerned knows it.